Public School Education

by Michael Müller

Now what is to be done to stop the poisoned source from which the diabolical spirit and the crimes of our country flow? A certain class come forward and say, "Let the Bible be read in our Public Schools. The Bible is the grand source of religion and morality. The Bible alone, without note or comment, is the grand source of life and civilization."

Very well, let the Bible be admitted, but with the Bible you must send the key—the interpreter. And then, which of all the Bibles, and whom among the numerous sects, shall be sent?

To read the Bible, without note or comment, to young children, is to abandon them to dangerous speculation, or to leave them dry and barren of all Christian knowledge. In mixed schools there is no other resource, because it is impossible to make any comment upon any doctrinal teaching of Christ and His Apostles, without trenching upon the conscientious opinions of some one or other of the listeners. "The Father and I are One." "The Father is greater than I." Here at once we have the Unitarian and the Trinitarian at a dead-lock! "This is My Body." "It is the spirit which quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." Here we have the primitive Lutheran, who believed in the real presence (consubstantially), and his Calvinistic coadjutor in reform, squarely at issue! "Unless you be born again of water and the Holy Ghost," etc. Here we have the Baptist and the Quaker very seriously divided in opinion. Nevertheless, widely as they differ the one from the other, there is a fundamental assimilation between all the Protestant sects which may render it possible for them to unite in one educational organization; and yet we find many of the most enlightened and earnest among the Protestant clergy of America now zealously advocating the denominational system, such as we find it in the European countries. They believe that education should be distinctly based upon doctrinal religion, and they are liberal enough to insist that, by natural right as well as by the constitutional guarantees of our free country, no doctrine adverse to the faith of a parent may lawfully be forced or surreptitiously imposed upon his child. It is well known, however, that between the Catholic faith and all Protestant creeds, there is a gulf which cannot be bridged over. It would, therefore, be simply impossible to adopt any religious teaching whatever in mixed schools, without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the Public Schools of the United States, and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which must be evident to every one. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education, administered without religion, is not only vain, but exceedingly pernicious; that it is fast undermining the Christian faith of this nation; that it is rapidly filling the land with rationalism; that it is destroying the authority of the Holy Scriptures; that it is educating men who prefix "Reverend" and affix "D.D." to their names, the more effectually to preach covert infidelity and immorality to Christian congregations; that, instead of the saving morality of the Gospel of Christ, which rests upon revealed mysteries and supernatural gifts, it is offering us that same old array of the natural virtues or qualities which helped, for a while, like rotten pillars, to prop up the heathen nations of old. It must, then, be evident to every man of common sense that the reading of the Bible alone, though it be the Word of God, will not counterbalance the results of Pagan education. Indeed the reading of the Bible alone is by no means an adequate remedy to stem the torrent of the evils in our country. What impurities have not been committed under the sanction of those words of the Lord, "Increase and multiply"! A host of sectarians, following in the wake of the Anabaptists of Munster, in Germany, have, on the authority of those words, dared to legitimate polygamy. On such misapplication of a text from the Gospel, Luther, Bucerus, and Melanchthon have permitted Philip, the Landgrave of Hesse, to have two wives.

In the name of the Bible, of the Word of God, Luther at first incited the German peasantry to revolt against their rulers, and then, frightened at his own work, he persuaded the princes to massacre the peasants. John of Leyden found, in his studies of the Bible, that he should marry eleven women at once. Herman felt himself clearly designated, in the Bible, as the Envoy of the Lord. Nicholas learned from it that there was no necessity of anything connected with faith, and that we must live in sin in order that grace may abound. Sympson pretends to find in the Scriptures an ordination that men should walk in the streets stark naked, to teach the rich a lesson that they must divest themselves of everything. Richard Hill justified, with the Bible in hand, adultery and manslaughter as deeds never failing to work out some good purpose, especially when joined to incest, in which case more saints are added to the earth and more blessed to the heavens. Even on the avowal of honest Protestants, no crime or abomination has ever failed to find its pretended justification in some scriptural text.

What, then, must we think of the reading of the Bible, when its reading, without note or comment, leads to such consequences? Indeed what has been said on the evil consequences of the Public School system on society proves sufficiently that the reading of the Bible is no adequate means at all to stem the torrent of crimes in our country. Nowhere has the Bible been read more frequently, during school-hours, than in the Public Schools of the New England States, and yet nowhere have the results of these schools proved more fatal than in these very States. The reading of the Bible alone, therefore, though it be the Word of God, will not counterbalance the results of Pagan education.

There are others who maintain "that religious instruction should be left to parents."

Now it is not only idle, but cruel, to say that the place and provision for such Christian instruction and formation is under the roof of the parents' home; that the best school is the family. This is indeed true of the early formation by affection, influence, example, by which fathers and mothers fashion the first outlines of character, and mature them while the education of their children is advancing. None have reminded parents of this more faithfully than the Pastors of the Church. But to say that fathers and mothers are to educate their children, and that their home is to be the school of Christian instruction, catechetical teaching, formation of conscience, preparation for sacraments, and the like, is either the shallow talk of men who know nothing of Christian education, or care nothing for it, or a heartless mockery of our poor. The rich, the refined, the educated, whose time is their own, do not educate their own children. They systematically send them to schools and colleges, or pay for tutors or governesses under their own roof. They wisely shrink from a work for which, if they have the time, they seldom have the acquirements or the gift, or the method of the perseverance or the patience. And if this be, as it is, universally true of those who are the most competent, and the most provided with all the means and opportunities for the work, now is it not hardness of heart, or want of common sense, to say that the children of the poor are to learn reading, and writing, and summing, indeed, at school, but that their Christian teaching and formation must be provided at home? The workingmen of these countries are at labor from twilight to twilight. Their wives have the burden of the whole family; the poor mother is alone both the head and the servant of the whole house. When is she to teach, and train, and shape, and fashion the characters, hearts, consciences, intellects of the children? Is it to be done in the midst of a day's work, or in the weariness after the day's work is done? And are they competent to do what the mother of the rich cannot do? Broken with cares, wearied by work, suffering from poverty, often fainting from sickness because worn out with all these burdens, how shall the father or mother of a family, huddled into a single room, do what the rich and the educated, in their spacious houses, and with abundant leisure, never dream of attempting?

Moreover, as I have shown in a preceding chapter, it must be admitted that a mother not educated in religious and moral principles cannot inform the mind and heart of the young child; this fully disposes of the argument that domestic teaching alone will supply what is acknowledged to be wanting in the "Public Schools." It is to be hoped that we shall hear no more of this heartless talk.

"Well, then," some will say, "let our children receive, in Sunday-schools, that amount of religious culture and instruction which the State says shall not be given in the school, and which is believed to be so essential in the education of the young."

Now it is in vain to open our Sunday-schools and expect to cure, on one day of the week, or rather a few hours of that day (when this even depends, in a great part, on the weather), the work not only of the other six, but the fruits of years of an ill-directed and godless State education. The Sunday-schools are nothing but so many "Poor-man's soothing plasters" on Christian consciences. The want of religious training for six days in the week, added to the positive knowledge of error on all religious subjects which youths may acquire during that time, will more than counterbalance the best-directed efforts of parents and the clergy to give any definite knowledge on the truths of revelation. The question whether or not religious education is compatible with Public School education, has been tried in all English-speaking countries, and in parts of Germany, with this result: that, a class, the Public School children are without any adequate religious knowledge or training. The clergy may have Sunday-schools, as they have, in all their churches; but what can children learn, in a few hours, of a subject which took three years from the Saviour of man to teach even to the apostles? And then the apostles, after three years of instruction from the lips of Christ, did not understand the Christian religion; they were slow to understand, and, after His resurrection, Christ upbraided them with incredulity and hardness of heart. Even the children of the Public Schools, as far as experience goes, lose all taste for the study of religion, which is developed among the children of Christian schools without any effort. Sunday-schools, at best, may train children to be Christians one day in the week, and Pagans six days. School-days over, the usual result will be Pagans all the seven days of the week.